I listened to my roommate breathe. I felt a nonsexual tingle when he turned over and sighed—a long, hard fwuhhh. They soothed me immensely, these human sounds. When he coughed, I could’ve kissed him. During the day I tried to fit the mold of the acerbic student, marked by tatty sweaters and a monolithic brow; but for all the books I waded through, my academic distaste for society was diluted the instant I stepped out of the library and realized it was dusk, that slow disaster, when one more day wicks down and all the world can’t help but sigh and let their shoulders slump. I shared this daily tragedy with the joggers and the elderly as we moseyed through the lilaced air, dinner on our minds. The sight of someone’s shoulders slumping, at this haunted hour or on the bus or one nook over in the library, meant more to me than sex (I swear), because it was the body at its purest: not the blank-brained thrall of sex or selflessness of books, but the quiet click of resignation as one slips into herself. This is why, much later, in our various house-sits, I loved to watch Oola in the shower. Even with the curtain drawn, I found myself enthralled by the long blur of her body as she went about its tasks, moving her hands in varying circles as she rinsed, washed, and repeated.
“This isn’t about sex,” I warned her when she beckoned with a soaped-up hand.
“You’re not coming in?” She pouted.
I sat down on the toilet seat. “Nope. I want to see you for what you are.” Back then, she’d laughed. “Fine, Nancy Drew. I hope you brought your journal. This might get boring.” Or, “Am I a porn star or a solo act or what?” But after her smile had faded and her stomach unclenched, the very same thing happened: Her shoulders slumped. She let the water loosen her. She raised her arms to place her hands in her hair, and the very act seemed to exhaust her. She lingered in this pose. She spun on her heel, water dripping off multiple planes of her body, and hummed weirdly. She looked out at me, unprepared. The steam was like a continent between us. She was right, of course; I’d brought my journal to take notes. I came to memorize her postures, the hygienic loop (rinse, wash, repeat) that, like prayers or digestion, lent me a glimmer of infinity via the banal.
“Is God bored or boring?” Oola drawled once, half-asleep on yet another train. Endless acres of countryside spooled past. She stared at the identical cows with displeasure. “Being everywhere all the time … seeing and making the same shit over and over…”
“Maybe God’s a stoner.”
“Or autistic,” she retorted. I’d laughed then and put my hand over her eyes, but only a few months later there I sat, reclining on the toilet seat, watching her bathe with a religious fixity.
By the end of my first semester of college, it seemed like everyone in the nostalgia course was thinner. We had been shedding more than pounds and now stood shoulder to shoulder in the cramped seminar room like men who had survived a plague, stripped to T-shirts, bald as Beth (in the spiritual sense), awaiting our anointment as the keepers of the real.
“This hasn’t been easy,” our professor, a wiry assortment of wools, intoned. Today, he wore a lamb’s wool sweater vest, which somehow added to the drama. We rarely saw his arms. He stood in front of the window and made eye contact with each of us. “I want to thank you boys for being brave.” Perhaps I only imagined him calling us boys. “The reward for your hard work cannot be understated. The past is irretrievable. I hope that, knowing this, you will be able to lead more fruitful, honest lives. You can leave your broken dreams, as well as the very concept of a broken dream, behind you now. Congratulations.”
He picked up his briefcase and calmly walked out the door. I watched from the window as he mounted his bicycle, skinny arms at right angles. The classroom was situated on top of a hill and so I followed him with my eyes as he glided down the grassy slope. To my surprise, he skirted the parking lot, where students hung out in clumps, and rode instead toward the line of oaks that marked the outer edge of campus. Beyond that lay a sleepy suburb, the sort with Lanes and Circles instead of Streets, informally known as Narnia. I watched him sail down one such shady lane, open a gate, rest his bike against the pickets, and disappear into a bungalow. By bike, he was mere minutes from the college quad, spitting distance from student housing. A tire swing hung from an oak in his yard.
I got hammered that night to erase the betrayal.
* * *
AS A BOY, I USED to love walking around my neighboring suburbs. My own community of hedges and high gates was no good for roaming, so I often found myself in the housing development three miles from my house. No one looked twice at a zitty white boy in school clothes, despite the already questionable length of his hair. I walked for hours, hands in my pockets, not much on my mind. I felt like I was taking my place in the American story, like one in a movie theater settling into his seat. Nothing thrilled me more than walking past a household just as they were sitting down to supper, rosy-cheeked from fatty foods and family time, or standing on the sidewalk and watching over someone’s shoulders, through the bay window, as they watched TV. I was a benevolent voyeur, pre-desire: I liked to taste other lives without ascribing a value. I liked watching people, most often women, fold clothes or cook dinner. I would wait for the moment they paused, when they broke their own spell and had to stop, put down the potato they had seconds ago been peeling with gusto, and gather themselves for a second. They invariably rested their hands (on a counter or blanketed back of a sofa) and stared into space. I watched their chests rise and fall. I felt in a dim way that I occupied this pause, that their vacant stares were not directed at me but surrounded me somehow, like a weather system or a figure of speech—idle youth, cold snap, charged phrases that we floated in.
The most illicit thing I ever spied on was a man watching porn in his living room. I was twelve. His blinds were drawn, but hastily: Through the thin spaces between them, I could detect a flurry, some sort of watered-down violence that I identified, at once, as sex. I could see his balding pate and watched him rather than the TV screen; his ruddy neck and shoulders seemed quite still in contrast to the flesh tones freaking out in front of him. After ten minutes, I walked home. I felt a bit guilty but not debilitatingly so. I sat down to dinner without washing my hands. After all, what had I done to implicate myself? I hadn’t even gotten hard. Far more damning was the day I saw a housewife nick her finger while grating Parmesan; I had to take a long shower to erase from my brain the image of her reeling backward to shout, “Sweet tits!” and even still, her ululations drifted back to me at dinner that same evening. My parents took no notice. They chewed each bite of food one hundred times because a medicine man they’d met at a Moroccan hotel told them to; this derailed any conversation more complex than How was school? The geriatric slosh of food, reduced to liquid before swallowed, filled the dark-wood dining room, and I longed, as I so often did, for the spats and trash of other homes.
* * *
IN COLLEGE, WHEN DRINKING WINE and rubbing legs in someone’s dorm room ceased to interest me, I’d get fucked up and walk through Narnia, on the streets where the professors lived. By 10:00 p.m., every car was snug in its garage, every window darkened. The rows of tidy lawns performed their water shows for no one. I wondered about the people, presumably middle-aged, who chose to live kitty-corner to an institution of youth. I imagined they liked being kept awake by our parties, the wildest of which were almost never on the weekend.
Those scallywags, the husband would remark to the wife. The hard beats of our music would make the bedstead rattle. Brats, she’d agree, and neither would mean it. They’d squint through the window at the bodies bungling by, never dressed right for the weather, and pick a surrogate among the gang. They’d pray silently for this waif or bookworm, for their safety and/or sexual conquest, and fall asleep only once they’d reached the point at which fantasy and memory collide, fusing into a single lithe body whose limbs you can almost believe to have once been yours. It pained me to know that my professor was among them, these flabby insomniacs, tending his garden while thinking of tits.
* * *
HER FIRST EXPERIMENT IN SEX was at the tender age of twelve. It crossed over with her first experiment in drugs, as these things so often do. We discussed this in hushed tones on a red-eye to Dubai. She drank Diet Pepsi and I went through three cans of V8, flattening the empty aluminum cans as quietly as I could. I will delineate it as follows:
1. She’d just gotten her braces off. Her teeth felt foreign, too big for her mouth. Every chance she got, she snuck off to the bathroom to examine them in the mirror. They were slimy like fruit. She pretended she was getting her school photo taken and posed with her hands on her hips, thinking, Cheese!
2. Her outfit was important: a seafoam-green leotard with white terrycloth shorts and sequined flip-flops. The leotard would present a challenge; it couldn’t be pulled off like a tank top. He had to roll it down with two hands, the way one rolls down the underpants of a much younger child, and just as gently. It stayed bunched at her waist for the majority of the evening.
3. It was the end of summer, an August heat wave, when no one could move for how humid it was and could speak, but just barely, and generally chose not to. She said this paralysis made the whole process easier. “None of the usual small talk. Just bodies in a room. The classic recipe for trouble.”
4. She was spending the night at a friend’s cousin’s house. This friend’s name is lost to the ages, but it almost certainly started with D. Her friend had an older brother, who also brought friends. These names she remembers very well: Jared, Jason, Tom, and Tom.
5. On the drive to the beach, they’d stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch. When D wasn’t looking, Jared took his straw and stuck it through the lid of Oola’s Coke. He rubbed his straw against hers. “Look,” he said. “They’re dancing.” At the time, she’d found it hysterical. They laughed like conspirators for the rest of the drive. “What’s so funny?” D whined. But it couldn’t be explained.
6. “Some Velvet Morning” by Nancy Sinatra was playing. The boys controlled the radio, mostly playing stuff she didn’t know and veering weirdly between moods, but she recognized Lee Hazlewood’s part as what her father sang while shaving. Hearing him mutter-sing it many weeks later would make her stomach drop. The radio was tuned to the local university station, something she only figured out later, hence the abrupt cut from Nancy to Tupac and garbled commentary from a sleepy male voice that she couldn’t quite place in the moment.
7. Honey-flavored tequila was mixed inexpertly with Diet Coke and drunk from dirty cups. They used it to wash down small white pills that Oola was too shy to ask the name of (“Probably caffeine pills,” she tells me). Her mug had a cartoon of a beaver on it and a speech bubble that read God Dam! She had ample time to study the beaver, its two off-white buckteeth and pinched expression of glee.
8. It happened on a corduroy couch. Half-and-half–colored, she’d thought to herself. The corduroy was soft to the touch, and she remembers tracing patterns in it when she got a bit bored. The doorway to the basement was strung with those plastic rainbow beads; she also liked watching them sway. They were in the so-called playroom, one of those basement rec rooms with wall-to-wall carpeting that are the hallmark of the American middle class, right down to the clank of hidden hot-water pipes and the lingering smell from pizza parties past.
9. It wasn’t sex, per se. At least she didn’t think so. She’d been told that sex was a joint act, but for the most part she just lay still. She tried petting his head but he didn’t react. She remembers the other boys watching and Jared, when he came up to kiss her, tasting like spearmint. She was relieved that he didn’t taste like the dinner that D’s mom had made them. She was touched, and then thankful, when she realized that he’d taken the time to gargle between supper and now. This made her lean in to him in a confused gesture of gratitude. He tore his mouth from hers and sped up whatever he had been doing before. She heard one boy go, “Wicked!”
10. She found herself repeating the beaver. “God dam!” For some reason, everybody started laughing, and so she joined in too. “God dam, god dam.”
11. D pretended to be mad at her afterward. “Dirty slut!” she’d shouted on the beach. Oola didn’t mind the word slut; she thought it sounded like a bicycle, the spokes going slut-slut-slut-slut when it picked up speed down a hill (that girl’s in the fast lane, her mother might remark). It was dirty that got her. She desperately tried to remember the last time she’d showered; what if D had seen something disgusting, some unacceptable crust from across the room, that Jared had been too polite (or busy) to mention? She barely knew what a body should look like, much less a sex-ready one. She burst into tears, and D, rather flustered, embraced her. They fell asleep in D’s bed after a long, giddy nightwalk in which they’d discussed their new wisdom and the startling crassness of boys. “My brother’s a sicko,” D had said gaily. “He told me on the car ride down here that he’s been wanting to do this for ages.” Oola had felt flattered but wrinkled her nose, for D’s sake, and said, “Nasty.”
12. Oola shrugs when she tells this story, which isn’t often. She always forgets or fudges some details. Sometimes Jared is sixteen and a half; sometimes he’s nineteen and on break from college. Most of the time, she wears her sandals during the act; in one version, Tom (which Tom is irrelevant) stands at the armrest and takes them off for her. At twelve, she was proud of what she’d been through. “If I didn’t think it was weird then, when it was fresh in my mind, why should I now? Everything’s weird when you’re twelve.” As for the concept of consent? “It’s puberty,” she says flatly. “The whole thing’s a trauma. You get wet for trauma. Trauma defines you.” Can you please explain this? “Every twelve-year-old girl, on some level, wants to be raped. That’s my experience.” That’s a terrible thing to say. You can’t mean that. “I’m not saying it’s ethical. Certainly not logical. God, no one ever said teenagers were known for clear thinking. For whatever reason, when I was that age, it just seemed like something that had to happen. Like getting your period. Everyone warns you about men, and at the same time that they’re telling you to watch out for creeps, they’re also highlighting how desirable you are. I mean, how can that not be exciting? To find out what was on everybody’s mind this whole time? Sex! It sorta seemed simple.” I see. “It gets drilled in your head how horny men are, how they want only one thing.” Here she imitated a grandmotherly drone and shook her finger in the air. “So why aren’t you allowed to want something too, even something bad?” I suppose that makes sense. “Also, in a way, I wanted to get it over with. Since everyone made it seem inevitable. Shitty, of course, but just the way things are. I thought it was like ripping off a Band-Aid, like once you’d been raped (or whatever it was) you could move on with your life. Like, somehow that was how you earned the right to walk alone at night. I wasn’t looking for trouble, OK? I was trying, in my fucked-up way, to put an end to it. God, I feel like a camp counselor. Are you hungry? I’m tired of sermonizing. Where’s the stewardess? I need those gingery biscuits.” All right. Here she comes. Just one more question.
13. She didn’t enjoy it. Well, perhaps for one second. Mostly it tickled and eventually got old. She thought of the flippers in a car wash. The only nice part was when she closed her eyes and thought about D, in a sulk in the corner. D had big tits and a cool older brother and a family beach house. But look at her now, knees pressed to voluminous chest in a beanbag, watching the show in spite of herself. Oola pretended to be interested in the circles Jared’s hands made. Look at me now, she thought to herself. She made a sound that she’d heard on TV. I win.
* * *
HER FIRST EXPERIMENT IN PROMISCUITY was flashing a bus full of veterans on their way to Red Lobster. She went through a bit of a phase after that, her exhibitionist August. After camp (an allegedly harrowing affair, replete with lanyards and lice checks) she would ride out to the pedestrian overpass, lean her bike against the chain-link fence (regulated by law to be too high to scale), and flash the multi-passenger vehicles on the interstate below. She would
n’t leave until she’d gotten ten. She bought an oversized army jacket expressly for the purpose of whipping it open and closed in a hurry, exposing her chest for so brief an instant that the only onlookers successfully scandalized were the pigeons patrolling the top of the fence (or so she wagered). She recalls the prick of the wind on her very bare skin in those moments: “I imagined that the bus drivers could see how hard my heart was beating, that the bored commuters would look up and see the subtle movement as it thudded.” She recalls the slight but not unpleasant chafing of nipple against canvas when she cycled home some hours later, re-swaddled in her XXL coat.
“How peaceful,” she sighed, “to be invisible again. I felt like a vampire. Yes, like a vampire, stopping at stop signs with blood on my breath. Mwa-ha-ha. Like later, in college, when I’d go to class after spending the night with some guy. I would sit in a hundred-person lecture on music theory with semen leaking out of me, and nobody would know. I took notes with a fury. The cum itself didn’t thrill me; I didn’t even think of the boy. I just loved the idea that nobody knew. I thought of the person sitting next to me, some nondescript girl in a college-name sweatshirt, also taking notes, maybe also dripping cum. Maybe everybody in the room, including the professor and the TA and the old people auditing, were secretly dripping, cum streaking their thighs, and we only took notes to pretend otherwise. Who cares about statistics? That was a stat that I wanted to know: how much semen was exiting X number of bodies, and what types of bodies, and at what point could we flow no more—at what point would we be flooded out, reach, like, a maximum saturation point and have our collective covers blown? When would Professor Kamaguchi’s tube socks overflow? That’s what I thought about when I should have been taking notes. If you don’t believe me, look at my grades.”
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